Karin Germany Value in An Exceptional Friend

East German construction workers building the Berlin Wall. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This summer we received news of the death of a family friend, a woman we called Karin Germany. Hers was an odd nickname, but to us Karin was more than a person; she was a country and even a philosophy.

This friendship started out simply, with an address, Paretzer Str. 1, Berlin-Wilmersdorf, and a name on a doorplate, Lafferentz-Krueger. In September 1982, having just arrived for a year in Berlin, I was seeking an apartment and wrote down a phone number that was under the word Zimmer (a room to sublet) on a note posted on a Free University bulletin board. In an anonymous old building, at the top of too many flights of stairs, a door opened to reveal a tall lady, a Bechstein piano and two Siamese cats. Surveying the hundreds of memoirs and novels that lined her hallway, I suddenly felt at home. Karin’s eyes were blue and did not blink. Here, I realized, was a friend to drink tea with.

It soon became clear that Karin would provide something more than a retreat; she provided a partner for adventure. Berlin then was still divided, but even split the metropolis daunted. Locals seemed to live behind the closed door of their own experience. Karin’s hand opened those doors for me. Through Karin I began to know Berliners in all their variety–natives born during World War II or earlier, and newer arrivals, who had come in the 1960s or 1970s and somehow stayed. Karin and her friends used a special word to describe this latter group, hängengeblieben, which means stuck hanging, as in a great hammock. “She came in 1968 and stayed here, hängengeblieben,” they’d say. Karin hosted hippies who bellowed at me about Nicaragua, as if I were Ronald Reagan himself, and a teacher who wanted to show me Tegel, where the Lutheran minister Dietrich Bonhoeffer had been imprisoned by the Nazis.

The U.S. editors I wrote for accepted the Berlin Wall as something permanent and geological, like a mountain range. Not so Karin, who knew people who had found themselves locked in a communist empire simply because they happened to be on the wrong side of the Wall the night the East German leader, Walter Ulbricht, ordered its erection. “History is like that, very chancy,” Samuel Eliot Morison once said–a quote that Karin, normally shy in speaking English, repeated.

Through Karin it became clear that even the blackest empire of all, the Third Reich, had featured some shades of gray. Karin’s father, Bodo Lafferentz, ranked high in Hitler’s hierarchy, leading a social program and the production of the VW car. Yes, Karin was a child of a Nazi, but she was also hurt by Nazis. Her father divorced her mother to marry a granddaughter of one of Hitler’s favorite composers, Richard Wagner. One year her father brought with him a wonderful miniature VW that ran on petrol, which Karin took for her own. The toy, however, soon disappeared. It had been made as a birthday gift for Hitler.

The Wall’s fall in 1989 came as no surprise to Karin. She had known the East Germans were there all along. With Karin I traveled not only into East Germany, for a church concert, but also to Wroclaw, Poland. Visiting these places was like finding an extra room in your apartment that you never knew was there, a sort of miracle. Karin herself voyaged farther, to Estonia, reviving old family connections and shipping food to Tallinn.

Karin had a remarkable capacity to transcend private life, placing it in the greater picture. During one of my recent visits, in winter, we rode the elevated train out of Berlin to the southwest and watched the ice boats careen across the Wannsee. “Looks like fun,” I said. “No,” she replied, “looks like peace.”

In her last years–she was born in 1932–Karin was less mobile and found herself literally shut in. With the narrowing of her life came a narrowing in the world, especially in the Middle East. Even in her last telephone call Karin reminded me that this, too, might be temporary: “Never lose courage,” she said, referring to both private life and events in Cairo. The hand of a friend comforts, yes, but it does its most important work when it opens a door.

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